


Bootstraps

by anneapocalypse



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Season/Series 16, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 22:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18040649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: As the battle for Chorus comes to a close, Carolina receives a message passed through time—and one last mission.AU in which the Reds and Blues actually understand what a paradox is.





	Bootstraps

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired in part by Robert Heinlein’s novella _By His Bootstraps_.
> 
> Many thanks to [ZaliaChimera](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zaliachimera) for the beta read.

**Armada 8  
2551**

In the dry heat of Desert Gulch that ripples up from the sandy ground in waves, no one notices the shimmer of active camouflage in the midday sun.

The flagpole, deflected and deflected again, leaves a mark where it strikes the concrete wall and clatters harmlessly to the floor on the upper level of the base. The orange sim trooper flinches on instinct, scrambles back against the wall.

“Hey, watch it!” the blue one snaps, throwing himself in front of the orange soldier in a way that seems… oddly protective, for opposing teams. “You could’ve killed someone!”

“It’s a flagpole,” Agent Carolina hears herself snap. “Don’t be stupid.”

 

* * *

 

_Hello Carolina._

_If all has gone according to plan, it is the year 2554 and you have just won the battle for the planet Chorus. Malcolm Hargrove is in custody, or about to be. And you’ve just lost someone very important to you._

_Take some time, and when you’re ready, listen to the rest of this message. It’s important._

_There’s something you need to do._

 

* * *

 

**Chorus  
2554**

The Reds and Blues pile into the Pelican, and with them, a surly Malcolm Hargrove in the flesh, his hands bound in a field restraint and the barrel of Sarge’s shotgun in his back. He’s tall, as tall as her father, and yet in person and surrounded by people in full power armor he looks strangely small.

Carolina stares at him, this ugly bald rat of a man and though she should be thinking of Chorus and everyone they’ve lost, everyone Kimball and the others have lost and know by name, what comes to mind instead is Wash and Maine sitting in prison. Connie and the people she trusted, who couldn’t protect her any more than Carolina could. And for a moment, she thinks: I could kill him.

It’s just a thought. Not an intent. Just: I could do that. I could kill him where he stands, right now.

“Oh,” Wash says, in a tone as coldly cheerful as she’s ever heard from him, “look what the cat dragged in,” and he clocks Malcolm Hargrove good, right in the face, and Sarge gives him a shove at the right moment and he lands roughly in one of the crash seats. Wash yanks the bar down to keep him there, and turns to her and Carolina feels a rush of gratitude she can’t find words for.

“Carolina,” Wash says, a little stiffly, and then just stops, and puts his hand on her shoulder and she know what that means, _You’re not alone here._

Good, she thinks, because I can’t—I can’t do this by myself.

 

The world doesn’t stop with Epsilon gone.

It spins on, fast and loud, all of Chorus united in celebration over their victory. Hargrove is taken into UNSC custody. Carolina resists the urge to drink herself into total oblivion the first festival night and instead smokes up with Grif and Bitters on the roof of Red Base in the canyon at Crash Site Bravo. The Chorus sky turns every color as evening turns to night turns to morning and for a while she isn’t sure if any of it was real or not.

But when she opens the file again the next day, the message is there.

Take some time. Right.

As if Carolina could stop moving. As if it would help to be _alone_ with the aching silence in her head and the hole it feels like has been punched through her chest.

Whatever this is, it’s something to do. A new mission. What’s she waiting for?

 

* * *

 

_When you’re ready, go talk to Dr. Grey._

_Show her the schematic hidden in an encrypted file in the data stick you always carry with you. You know the one._

 

* * *

 

**Chorus  
2554**

“Can you build it?” Carolina says uncertainly, peering over Dr. Grey’s shoulder. The schematic looks hopelessly complex to her untrained eye. But Emily just laughs.

“Oh, sweetie. This is _just_ my kind of challenge! It’ll take some time to gather all the materials—I’ll need some help from you and your friends for that! But if you mean, can I follow these directions, of course I can!” She winks. “It’s like they were made for me, really! _Fascinating,_ too—it seems this device works on the same principles as a slipspace drive.” Dr. Grey swipes eagerly through the pages on her touchscreen. “Not unlike that time distortion unit you told me about, from Project Freelancer. But much more advanced, of course!”

“Right,” Carolina says, looking away. The heavily annotated diagrams flying by on the doctor’s screen are a little bit dizzying to look at. “So—what do you need?”

“Well, a functioning Shaw-Fujikawa drive would be a start. Or as functioning as possible!”

“How are you—I mean, isn’t this thing supposed to be handheld?”

“Well, I’m not going to use the drive _as-is_ , silly.”

“Right,” Carolina says, and thinks maybe she shouldn’t ask any more questions. She probably wouldn’t understand the answers anyway. “But it will work?”

Emily turns from the screen for a moment, and looks thoughtfully at Carolina. “You already know it will, don’t you?”

“What was the clue?” Carolina asks.

“I know my own work, sweetheart. Even if I don’t remember doing it!”

“Well,” Carolina says. “Okay then. We’ll head out to the Boneyard first thing in the morning.”

 

* * *

 

_It will work. Trust me, Dr. Grey won’t have any trouble building it. She drew up the schematic herself, reverse-engineered it from a functioning... prototype, and we built one. Not in your future, but in mine._

_Once you have the device, you must dial in the attached coordinates exactly. This will take you to a particular outpost on Armada 8, on a day you probably don’t remember. On that day, an orange sim trooper almost takes a flagpole to the solar plexus from your old friend Tex. I know, right? It’s always fucking Tex. Anyway. He doesn’t get hit, because you’re going to go back there and deflect that flagpole from hitting him. That’s what I need you to do. That’s what this is all about._

_It won’t be hard. You’ve still got your active camo. Just a tap is all it will take, and then just get out of there and don’t be detected. Because that man lives, a bunch of other people will as well, and some really crazy stuff won’t happen._

 

* * *

 

**Chorus  
2554**

“Time travel,” Kimball says.

“I know,” says Carolina.

 _“Time_ travel,” says Kimball.

Carolina says, “I know.”

They’re having coffee, the morning after the trip to the Boneyard. The better part of a day spent picking through the remains of crashed ships, and Dr. Grey has her working slipspace drive. It’s in her hands for now. And for Carolina, there’s nothing to do but wait.

It’s strange, how urgent it feels, how she falls asleep thinking about it and wakes up thinking about it and goes for her morning run thinking about it and over her post-run coffee she listens to the files again. Both of them. Epsilon’s goodbye, and then the message recorded in her own voice.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” Carolina says. “I shouldn’t have burdened you with this.”

Kimball lets out a sad, almost desperate laugh. “You think you should have kept something like this from me?”

Carolina doesn’t know, honestly. The answer might be yes. God knows Kimball has been through enough, _Chorus_ has been through enough, without the knowledge that it is, theoretically, possible to change the past.

“You want to know why,” Carolina says. “Why this is all we did. Why we let the war happen.”

“I know why,” Kimball says, sighing and staring into her tea cup. “I know. Dr. Grey explained it to me. The paradox problem, the variables involved. What happened here… there were far too many variables. You couldn’t _know_ what the critical point was. Even if you went back in time and just assassinated Hargrove…there’s no way of knowing what else that would change. There’s no way to be sure you could close the loop.” Kimball spreads her hands. “And if you could do that, why not go all the way back to Harvest, prevent first contact—prevent _that_ war from happening? Save _billions._ ” She meets Carolina’s eyes, and though there’s pain there, and so much sadness, there is a fondness too. She puts a hand on Carolina’s. “Who knows what would happen. You certainly wouldn’t be here today.”

Carolina nods.

“I know why,” Kimball says, and sighs heavily. “It still… it just _feels_ wrong, you know?”

“Yeah,” Carolina says. “I do.”

 

* * *

 

_You can’t save everyone. I know that’s going to be the hardest pill to swallow about all this. You can save some people. So why not everyone—why not Connie, Maine, the twins, York, even Tex? Why not—stop. I know what you’re thinking. Just don’t._

_There’s no trial and error here. Trust me. I come from a future where we came really,_ really _close to breaking the timeline irreparably. Nature abhors a paradox. And if you create one—that’s it. We don’t know exactly what happens then, but we’re pretty sure there’s no second chances. You don’t come back from that. That’s why all the safe bets. Not really our style, I know. It had to be this time._

_Even this much is a risk._

_But if this goes according to plan—if you do what I’m asking you to do here—the timeline should re-stabilize. The future I come from will never happen. You will save about a dozen people from dying, and several more from being badly hurt. I know that from where you’re standing, that doesn’t sound like a whole lot, and it doesn’t seem like enough. Again, I’m sorry._

_This isn’t about fixing everything, or erasing all of our mistakes. Trust me. We’re leaving plenty of them intact._

_But we decided it was right to try and save the people we could._

 

* * *

 

**Chorus  
2555**

With time travel, you think you can just try again, keep looping back until you get it right. At Desert Gulch, this will be true, because she’ll already be in an active loop. If she misses the block and the flagpole strikes the orange soldier, she can just loop back and try again, and get it right. That much is safe, in theory.

“Like Wyoming,” says Tucker.

Carolina turns her gaze from Dr. Grey’s whiteboard. “What?”

“Wyoming. Back in Blood Gulch, when we were fighting him. He kept using his time distortion unit, so we could never beat him. Every time he died, Gamma would just loop back.”

“But you won, right?” Carolina says curiously. “How did you finally beat him?”

“Oh, Tex killed him.”

“Right,” Carolina says, sighing. “Of course she did.”

“Right!” Dr. Grey says brightly, drawing loops on the whiteboard. “Closed loop, you see. As long as you don’t do anything to prevent yourself from time-traveling in the future, you’re all good! A _paradox_ , however!” She pauses for dramatic effect, brandishing her purple marker. “A paradox would be created by using _backward_ time travel to _change_ the past such that you _never_ travel back in time in _that_ future!” She scribbles some more. “Say, somebody you love gets hurt, so you travel back in time to keep them from getting hurt. But oh no! The circumstances in which they got hurt directly led to your time traveling! So if they never get hurt, you never have a reason to travel back and save them! The loop can’t close! Thus, a paradox!”

“Boom,” says Caboose helpfully.

“Well,” Dr. Grey adds, “in theory, of course. Never seen it tested!”

“Great,” says Tucker. “Really inspiring confidence here.”

“We’re not _going_ to test it,” Carolina says. “The whole point is _not_ to create one.”

“Yeah,” Tucker says. “The question is, will it work?”

“It will work,” Carolina says. “It has to. If it didn’t work, I wouldn’t have gotten the message.”

“Yeah, unless the _other_ you isn’t the one who collapses the timeline, _we_ are. You’re just the first _you_ in the new timeline who got the message. If you don’t pass it to the _next_ you—”

“There isn’t a ‘next’ me,” Carolina says, “there’s only _one_ me, passing the message to myself. That’s how this works.”

“Oh my god,” Tucker says. “I have a headache.”

“Yeah,” Carolina says. “Tell me about it.”

 

* * *

 

_I don’t actually know if this will fix things for me. It’s possible that every time loop simply branches into a new timeline—that you will branch off into your own, and I’ll be stuck here in mine. From what we’ve observed, though, we don’t think that’s how it works. That’s why a paradox is such a big deal. The universe only has one timeline. You can create loops, you can tie it in knots, but you break it, you bought it._

_Theoretically, anyway. Unfortunately, until you receive this message, this is all theoretical._

 

* * *

 

**Chorus  
2555**

“I don’t remember,” Carolina mutters. “The sim trooper. I don’t remember him. I can barely remember the training drop. Hadn’t thought about that one in years.”

“Why would you?” Wash says.

Carolina doesn’t answer for a moment.

“If he had died,” she says finally, “in this timeline, I mean. Do you think I’d remember then?”

Wash opens his mouth.

“Don’t lie to me, Wash.”

Wash closes his mouth.

“How many ‘incidents’ do _you_ remember from training?” Carolina says.

“Freelancers, or sim troopers?”

“Either one.”

“A… few,” Wash says.

“Yeah,” says Carolina. “A few. You remember all their names?”

This time Wash doesn’t answer.

“That’s what I thought.”

Wash is quiet for a moment, then says, “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

Carolina hides a smile behind her coffee mug, arching an an eyebrow. “You worried about me, Wash?”

Wash snorts, not without affection. “I have never doubted that you can handle things. I just wanted to offer.”

“I know.” Carolina sips her coffee, and feels a little warmer somehow. “I’ll be back before you know it, Wash. Literally.”

 

* * *

 

_It kind of feels like I’m going to my death, in a way. I know I’m not… not exactly. But if this works, my future will cease to exist. The me I am now will never exist._

_Why should I be sad about that? I don’t know. Church could probably tell me, if he was here._

_I swore I was done with the lone wolf thing. I do a lot of that kind of swearing. But more people… complicate things. Sometimes the best plan is the simplest one. And sometimes if you need something done you have to strap your boots on and do it yourself._

 

* * *

 

**Armada 8  
2551**

She remembers the periphery, more than the match itself. She remembers how her father, seeing her eagerness to prove herself after the Sarcophagus mission, decided to let her try—in a simulation match. Against Tex. She remembers the restrained delight with which he announced that.

Maybe he thought she still needed to be taken down a peg.

But the match itself was less than memorable, except for one oddity, and even that doesn’t come back to her until she sees it happen, the way Tex turns, aims with cold precision and hurls the flag directly at her.

There’s no _reason_ for Tex to do that. The flag is the objective. All she has to do is hold it to win.

Instead, she hurls it at Carolina with what Carolina now knows to be lethal force.

She knows _now_ , of course. She knows about Omega, knows that Tex was constantly holding him back. Even the shadow of him Epsilon carried lurked at the edge of her subconscious, ready to feed on her anger when it arose.

At the time, it was just one more reason to hate Tex.

From the outside, she can see it: the trajectory of the pole, once deflected, toward the orange-armored simulation soldier.

All it takes is a quick tap of an invisible fist to alter its course just a little more.

 

* * *

 

_Once you’ve done that, you’ll have to travel to the second set of coordinates. Your team will be out at the scrapyard, so you shouldn’t run into anyone in the locker room. Connie’s data stick will be in Tex’s locker. Copy this folder onto it._

_There’s a script attached that will keep the files hidden until Epsilon opens it a few years later, at which point the Trojan will activate and the file will be hidden in Epsilon’s code. Don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt him. Dr. Grey wrote that, too. It’ll stay there until—well. Until Epsilon fragments for the last time. Then it will attach itself to his goodbye message, and find its way to you._

_All_ you _have to do is get it onto the data stick. The script will do the rest._

_Epsilon told me—told us that sometimes, the hero doesn’t get to see the ending. That sometimes, they just have to have faith that what they did was worth it. That it worked. This is something like that, I guess._

 

* * *

 

**UNSC _Mother of Invention_  
2551**

The coordinates put her in the locker room, directly in front of Tex’s locker. Certainly can’t fault her alternate self for precision.

She keeps the active camo up, even with the locker room deserted. Her armor now, mostly refitted over time from salvaged parts on Chorus, bears little resemblance to her old Freelancer armor beyond her signature color. If she is spotted, she will have some serious explaining to do.

The tags are in Tex’s locker, right where they’re supposed to be.

Carolina almost puts her fist through the metal door. She lets out a deep, frustrated sigh instead, even though this is all going the way it’s supposed to.

She never used her locker, Connie. You had to know that. You _had_ to. How could you make such a simple mistake?

If she had known the truth—would she still have killed you?

Carolina could fix that, too. Dial up that dim bunker with its red emergency lighting, step through invisible and deflect that axe before it sinks through Connie’s breastplate, cleaving her chest. Before she can stagger away and bleed out in an escape pod.

She could make sure Connie gets away alive.

But there’s absolutely no telling what else that would change.

For this to work—for the loop to remain closed—Carolina must return to hunt the Director, befriend the Reds and Blues, and eventually wind up on a planet called Chorus. A schematic must be placed on a data stick that she will find, years from now, in a crashed Pelican—because someone carried it with her everywhere, out of guilt, maybe, or simply as a memento. Carolina couldn’t say, really. What she knows is that when she finds that memento, she too will carry it everywhere she goes.

The data stick is the only reliable way to be sure that schematic is on her person when she arrives on Chorus. Certainly her alternate self must have considered just planting the file on the planet to be found, but that would leave the outcome to too many variables. A planet in the middle of a chaotic warzone, a doctor soon to be on the run after every other person on her base is slaughtered. No. There is nothing on Chorus she could’ve counted on.

Her alternate self also—and this is the one that really starts to break her brain when she thinks about it—also could not simply travel to the critical point and hand off the schematic, because that would be in _her_ timeline, the dead timeline. She needed a mechanism by which the file would be transferred without her—after she and her entire future ceased to exist. She had opened the loop, and she had to leave behind a way to close it—one she could be sure that Carolina, _this_ timeline’s Carolina, would find, no matter what.

Therefore, the file had to be planted in a place that could be counted on not to diverge when the timelines did.

The vital piece of the puzzle wasn’t the flagpole. In fact, the other Carolina didn’t have to touch the flagpole at all.

The vital piece of the puzzle was the _file._

The message from Carolina to another version of herself, and the schematic to build the device she would need to do it.

Carolina found the file on the data stick. Therefore, she has to make sure the file is put on the data stick at some point in the past, so that she can find it.

The file created by Dr. Emily Grey, a Dr. Emily Grey who never was, and never will be.

The file created in a future that will not happen, but a file that now exists in this timeline, and will be passed from her future self to her past.

As long as the transmission happens, the loop will remain closed. There will be no paradox. But if for any reason Carolina fails to plant the file, or fails to find it, the timeline will unravel.

Carolina slots the data stick into her armor, and uploads the file.

 

* * *

 

_We had some really shitty years, I know. I’m sorry I couldn’t change any of that. But you’ve made it this far. You know how much better things are now, and you didn’t need a future you to tell you it was going to get better. You got here on your own._

_I don’t know what your future’s going to look like, but I know you’ll get there._

_You can do this._

_Carolina out._

END


End file.
